It’s not about the money, says Mariella Frostrup. You describe your husband as if he were a stranger, so think hard about your future
The dilemma I’m a 60-year-old woman and although I have worked for years teaching English, I have always been financially dependent on my husband. He is very involved in the evangelist church and gives them a percentage of his salary. The knowledge of this, together with a constant struggle to get by, has made me feel so bitter. I contemplated leaving, when the children were younger, because of his strong Christian values and my strong non-Christian values and all the complications of this. But I didn’t have the courage to plunge both myself and the children into further hardship.
This issue has come to the fore again as I struggle to help one of my daughters out with university fees. How can he give so much to a church when he knows our children are struggling? It just makes me mad. But he perhaps rightly feels that it is his salary to do as he wishes with. I am aware that my dependency is my own fault. My way of dealing with all this has been to plunge myself into a number of outside activities that have allowed me, at little expense, a lovely social world far removed from my husband’s church circle, which I find so oppressive.